THE MEDIUM; 'Lost' in Translation

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Published: April 25, 2010

On a recent Tuesday, Twitter crackled with anticipation. A significant episode of ''Lost,'' the eerie long-running TV series about plane-crash survivors on a haunted island, was coming up. A Twitterer called dmaul53854 announced his plans to lift weights and ''get ready for some #Lost awesomeness!'' using the pound sign to create a tag to make his tweet easier to find. ''Happy #LOST day!'' wrote peterkz. Macarolribeiro tested her character allowance: ''#LOSTDAY!!! Lost!!! Lost!!! Lost!!! Lost!!! Lost!!! Lost!!! Lost!!! Lost!!! Lost!!! Lost!!! Lost!!! Lost!!! Lost!!! Lost!!! Lost!!!''

''Lost,'' ABC's tour de force farrago, ends on May 23 after a run of six seasons, during which it inspired ardent fan sites, rococo wikis and message boards packed with conjecture about the meaning of the show. The possibility now exists that the mystery-rich drama, which dug its tendrils into the Internet as no other show before it, might at last pay off its fans' psychic investment in the show's supernatural cosmology. What would that be like, to be paid back? Fans can only imagine. All questions answered, we would no longer toss and turn over the legion ''Lost'' enigmas, including Jacob, the Man in Black, the Smoke Monster and the number 4815162342. The pieces of the plot would fit together like a dresser from Ikea. Complete and perfect understanding: an epistemological heaven in which all is revealed.

Or maybe ''Lost'' -- which is so deep in the narrative red -- will never pay us back. It will strand us without answers. On Twitter, KillerCassandra dared to voice this dread: ''Ever think at the end #Lost won't explain anything & the producers are like, 'We'll be off the air by then so who cares?' ''

Do we ever think that? Hmm, yes. Since the very first season, fans have entertained that grim thought. But to stick with the series has been to hold onto faith that its riddles might resolve. And now we're close to finding out if ''Lost'' is going to make good. It's no wonder that, in the countdown to the two-hour finale next month, every episode has been painstakingly live-microblogged, with viewers simultaneously studying the show and posting their insights, marginalia and OMGs on Twitter.

Tweets about ''Lost'' are designed either for a broad audience (tagged simply ''#LOST'') or a narrow one (left tagless, so they're just for a poster's subscribers). Either way, a twittering Lostie, with her laptop and smartphone screens before her, does well to keep an eagle eye on the TV itself. To post something stupid about ''Lost,'' like an impatient question that the show promptly answers, is to be ignored. On the other hand, if she makes an obscure connection, she may find her words retweeted -- passed on to hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands of other fans. (When the Twitterer called thefount, for example, recognized a reference to ''Seinfeld'' on a recent episode -- possibly suggesting, as the poster jefklein separately noted, that ''Lost,'' like ''Seinfeld,'' is ''about nothing'' -- the tweet quickly spread.)

Watching the ''Lost'' tweets roll out like a weather front is mesmerizing. It's collective hermeneutics and forensics, a spectacle of state-of-the-art, real-time crowd-sourcing. As ABC began to broadcast the episode ''Everybody Loves Hugo'' on April 13 at 9 p.m., Tiggy4Real, alluding to the show's popular competitor, Fox's ''Glee,'' used asterisks to set off a third-person description of what she was doing, as some twitterers do, and wrote, ''Oh yea, #Glee is on . . . *keeps the tv on #Lost.*'' After an explosion on the TV screen, tweets upon tweets read ''KABOOM.'' Twitterers praised the episode and wove it into their master interpretations of the show. The poster zegolf wrote: ''This week's #Lost provides further proof of what the show truly is: A love story.''

Just as ''Lost'' will soon pass into an afterlife of reruns and digital distribution, so Losties are preparing to cross over. They'll no longer be fans of an active show, and the fans who stay loyal to ''Lost'' in the next dimension -- parsing the extras on the last-season DVD, agitating for a movie or spinoff -- will have to refashion themselves as antiquarians. They might also have to shift their worship to another show. Gleeks, as the vocal fans of ''Glee'' call themselves, seem poised to take over as TV's biggest superfans. Some Losties have hinted on Twitter that they will become Gleeks when ''Lost'' ends.

Twitter and other Web communities are keeping ''Lost'' under close scrutiny now, looking for a reward, in part, for paying attention all these years. The creators of ''Lost'' have made the fans believe that the show is good for its debts and is not making narrative promises it can't keep. But it has also left loose ends many, many times; there's plenty of reason to doubt it will pay up. The debts are too many, too compounded in interest. And yet: maybe the show's creators will pull it off. And maybe -- as ''Lost'' has alternately implied and denied -- heaven exists.

POINTS OF ENTRY: THIS WEEK'S RECOMMENDATIONS
FIND ''LOST''
Canceled cable in 2009? Quit ''Lost'' the year before? Catch up! Recent episodes appear free on ABC.comandHulu.com. For a price, you can watch on iTunes, DVD or Netflix.

PODCASTAWAYS
Spirited podcasts by ''Lost'' fans are well worth a listen, especially now. Sample from Jacob's Cabin, Rethinking LOST, Lost Mythos Theorycast, Lost Unlocked, The Transmission, The LOST Podcast With Jay and Jack and Losties With Jed and Cara. Google them all for ways to play.

THE OTHERS
They don't give much away, but the coy and entertaining ''Lost''producers Damon Lindelof (@damonlindelof) and Carlton Cuse (@CarltonCuse) can be enjoyably followed on Twitter.